Folks are always trying to ‘fix’ the calendar. They should stop.
Timothy P. Carney
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Montrealites and other Quebecers apparently had a lousy summer weather-wise, which inspired local columnist Josh Freed to propose calendar reform.
Freed’s ideas for reform, which steadily increase in terms of absurdity, include these:
TRUMPISM 2.0: INSIDE THE FORMER PRESIDENT’S PLANS FOR A SECOND TERM
“Plan 1: Move summer… why not just extend spring two more months, then move our summer holidays to fall? Under this proposal, September would become the new July, and October the new August.”
“Plan 2: Move weekends.”
Freed is not going to get his calendar changes, and to his credit, he’s joking. But he followes a long line of failed calendar changes that includes a couple of mass murderers and liberal blogger Matt Yglesias.
The world is a messy place; humans are fallen, and the universe is too complicated to fit neatly into the mind of man. We can make sense of things — that’s what science and math are — but our sense-making and rationalizing of the world can go only so far.
The human mind is made to seek order, of course, but that order-seeking impulse needs to be kept within its limits. The post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation worldview, however, leads men to believe the world can be fully rationalized. This trait is particularly present among autocrats, who believe that error and suffering happen in the world only because the good and smart people haven’t fully taken over.
Robespierre, the murderous French revolutionary, believed that if he abolished religion, outlawed dissent, and chopped off all the right heads, he could create a “rational” Republic. Integral to this bloody rationalizing campaign was his calendar with a ten-day week. This meant each month was 30 days, divided into three 10-day weeks, meaning seven days of work followed by a three-day weekend. Plus a five-day festival at the end of the year.
Back in 2013, liberal blogger Yglesias endorsed this plan (minus the French names for the months). “We’ll just need to bear some one-off transition costs in terms of realigning everyone’s birthdays and anniversaries,” he granted. I remember this post from a decade ago, and Yglesias acknowledged later on Twitter that this might upset Jews and Christians whose calendar is built around a Sabbath once every seven days.
Of course, abolishing the Sabbath was part of the point of this “worthwhile Jacobin initiative,” as Yglesias called it.
Likewise, Stalin, on a couple of occasions, wanted to remake the calendar as part of detaching people from God.
Here’s the New York Times’s coverage of one of those efforts — the “Sovietized Year.”
For more perspective, here’s a video about these various efforts and why they failed.
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Trust me, as a nerdy guy whose brain craves order, I’ve also wasted hours thinking about this sort of thing. (In my version, the year would shift about 10 days and run solstice to solstice. The calendar would have 12 months of 30 days, and there would be one spare holiday day [between months] at the end of each quarter, plus a spare day that would be the first of the year. [Leap years would get a fifth spare day, which would mean two holidays on the summer solstice.])
But wisdom and contentment are understanding that things aren’t always going to be neat and clean, and if you try to make everything rational, you sometimes end up with mass murder by the state.